Word: beethoven
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Philharmonic produced a storm of bravos with Samuel Barber's Second Essay for Orchestra, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. Afterward, Shostakovich rushed to the stage to embrace Lenny. Pasternak went backstage to kiss Lenny, cried: "You have taken us up to heaven. I've never felt so close to the esthetic truth. When I hear you, I know why you were born." Said Lenny: "I adore this...
Lenny gave them two programs to remember; Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven and on to the U.S. moderns, with Aaron Copland's high-stepping Billy the Kid and George Gershwin's swelling, Turkey-fresh Rhapsody in Blue. Both nights he yielded to thunderous ovations, played encores till way past midnight. Even after the players had left the stage, spectators refused to budge, clamored for more. Only when Lenny was seen dashing for the exit (where he was swamped by autograph seekers) did the Turks go home...
...Beethoven: Overture and Incidental Music to "The Ruins of Athens" (Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Angel, mono and stereo). In 1811 Beethoven hurriedly scribbled incidental music to accompany August von Kotzebue's festival play celebrating the opening of a theater in Pest (later part of Budapest). The music is mostly as neglected as the play itself-a fantasy about Minerva awakening after 2,000 years to find Athens in ruins and the last vestiges of culture preserved in Hungary. The work unfolds in a pleasant but innocuously declamatory style that only occasionally echoes Beethoven...
...Lucerne Milk (U.S.) is peddled by "Satellite McCool," a beatnik, bop-talking pianist, busy playing far-out music. Asked for his musical preference, Satellite says he likes his own stuff. "I mean classical, like Beethoven. Where is it??" Asked for the essence of his philosophy, he answers dreamily: "Where am I??" Then he pulls a container of Lucerne Milk out of the piano...
...supreme quality of the Beethoven and Brahms works, and the superb artistry with which they were performed that affected one so deeply. A final tribute is that, inordinately difficult as both works are, these artists played with such apparent effortlessness that one left with the glowing feeling of being able to do it oneself. This was one of those events that make one want to say, even in 1959, "What a wonderful world this is that we live...